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Is Valve's Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?

04-07-2013, 12:30 PM

Phoronix: Is Valve's Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?

When I exclusively reported last year that Valve would be releasing their Steam client for Linux and Source Engine, most Linux desktop users and gamers were filled with joy. However, now that the Steam client is out in the wild and more and more games are coming to Linux via this digital distribution system, it seems not everyone is happy...

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Wow, just wow. Finally, a commercial company is porting his games to Linux and some people start bashing their effort? Don't want closed-source? Then don't use it. And if you want to bash, bash all the other companies that are not even considering porting their games to Linux.

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Steam is optional. If you don't like proprietary software, than don't use it. Case closed. Go play console tic-tac-toe instead and stay in your mom's basement.

Proprietary software is what GNU/Linux needs right now. We need professional a-grade games, video editors etc. Not to mention software companies like Valve are contributing a lot to drivers, tools etc... things that we would not have otherwise. Linux needs a good push in right direction, we wan't it to be 'better', don't we?

I just don't see how can a hippie in his basement develop a $1,000,000 software project by himself. Unfortunately, some software has to be proprietary to exist. It is fundamentally impossible for it to be free as freedom or even free as free beer.

Now, from perspective of end user - I want to play PROPRIETARY game, I have these options:
- Boot into Windows and suffer
- Run VM and suffer
- Go with Wine and hope it works semi-decently and suffer
- Double click in Steam and play and have good time

I think the latter option is best for everyone. Thank you Valve for your effort to make it possible.

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Is dumb moronix bad & damaging for Linux? Yes! Only on moronix we can find such childish articles which are really damaging to Linux and Valve. If someone doesn't want steam nobody forces him to install it. It's such simple, but moronix have to scream about some thread like a little baby.

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The only real thing about Valve's efforts that I have a problem with is how close they are to Canonical. They could have chosen a more distro neutral approach, but instead it seems they got in bed with Shuttleworth.

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The only real thing about Valve's efforts that I have a problem with is how close they are to Canonical. They could have chosen a more distro neutral approach, but instead it seems they got in bed with Shuttleworth.

You are not a developer, huh? You do not know how hard it is to battle fragmentation on Linux. If I was an enterprise, I would partner up with Canonical too.

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The only real thing about Valve's efforts that I have a problem with is how close they are to Canonical. They could have chosen a more distro neutral approach, but instead it seems they got in bed with Shuttleworth.

There is no such thing as a distro-neutral approach. The large majority of potential Linux Steam users are probably people running Ubuntu. I think this is an assessment made in advance to cater to the biggest group. In this context, one could consider Ubuntu to be 'distro-neutral'.

Furthermore, if it runs on Ubuntu it will probably even run on Gentoo without much hassle.